History and aesthetic of computer animation and virtual reality. Notes on Los Angeles in the 1980s and the computer animation community of that time. Miscellaneous commentary on the archaeology of the cold war, as well as notes on the esoteric knowledge as it manifests in popular culture, cinematic theory, the hollow earth, espionage, corruption in civic governance, the aesthetics of conspiracy theories, the failure of the cultural myth and other related topics.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Communist Conspiracy or World Financial Collapse?

This post will attempt to channel certain belief systems from the long - over Cold War in order to explain current events in the world economy.

There is a lot of concern in certain circles that the crash of the Shanghai stock market will not only affect the Western stock markets, but that it signals a recession or depression in mainland China that will also affect the economies of the West. No one really knows how this one will turn out and every day you read a different story as the stock markets in China and the west continue to evolve.

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, 1960 or so, America and the world-at-large would not have had to worry about the Chinese communist stock market crash. This is because back in those days the communist Chinese were actually real Marxists and would never, ever have allowed that discredited tool of capitalism, the stock market, to exist as part of their economy.

Communist cadres would have fought to the death to prevent such an abomination from coming into existence. So how can we explain that this modern communist government has a stock market? There are only two explanations that seem possible: either they have fallen into sin and abandoned their most cherished beliefs in a shallow attempt to get rich or it is part of a larger plot to destroy the West by emphasizing the contradictions of decadent Western Capitalism.

Furthermore, the Shanghai stock market is not the only anomaly. We also have the spectacle of the Chinese Communist Party selling their own people as disenfranchised slave labor to western capitalists in order to increase the profits of western corporations and make China the (cheap) manufacturing center of the global economy.

This is is a very odd situation it seems to me. Karl Marx and Chairman Mao must be spinning in their graves.

And of course the potential collapse of the Chinese market threatens both the larger Chinese economy as well as the world financial markets since we are all part of the global economy whether we want to be or not But surely the collapse of the Shanghai market could not have been a surprise to the Communist party. Even the most casual student of capitalist economies of the last two centuries would have shown them that market crashes as a result of speculation and/or panic and the resultant economic depression is what unregulated markets do. It is their nature.Our managed press and slave-economists notice nothing and say nothing while the world holds its breathe and waits to see whether the economy is about to take another fall. .

But in the more entertaining days of the cold war, things would have been different. Back then, political and economic analysts would look at this implausible communist capitalist behavior and the uncertainty caused by the collapse of their finance market and suspect that we were witnessing some sort of implacable communist conspiracy to destroy western democracy. I propose that the broad outlines of the perceived plot would be as follows:

1. First, China would use their slave labor to attract manufacturing to its shores with the intent to utterly destroy manufacturing in target nations, such as the USA and rely on the self-destructive greed of the wealthy industrialists of the west to
sacrifice any value or public good in order to increase short term profits. In so doing, the wealthy industrialists put a huge number of people out of work in America while continuing their efforts to finally destroy any remnant of the labor movement. Disenfranchised, impoverished and without help from their government who is indifferent to the misery of the poor, these unemployed people will be excellent recruits for future revolutionary movements.

2.
The Communist elite then use standard capitalist techniques to stimulate their economy in specific sectors. Economic stimulation, trade barriers, and other policies create an overheated economic boom. In this way, China becomes the fastest growing economy in the world, at least for a while. The International Communist Conspiracy is almost ready to pull the rug out from under the feet of the Western dupes who suspect nothing.

3. In an astonishing rejection of fundamental Marxist theory, a Chinese stock market is created. Stocks are traded, valuation
goes through the roof, and investors from all over the world make
substantial investments in Chinese ventures and Chinese billionaires
make investments in American and other non-Chinese companies.

4. Now, having made the stupid west dependent on your economy for their profits and integrated their financial markets with your own, you begin to pull the whole thing apart. First you selectively stop overheating your economy, causing sectors like real estate to begin to implode.
5. Your stock market collapses and takes the western markets with it. The world economy collapses.

6. The communist cells created from the people whose lives were destroyed by the greed of the Western capitalists are activated and a revolution occurs in the west which soon becomes part of the international communist government controlled by Beijing.

7. Helpless, and with their traditions of freedom destroyed, you can now implement your evil plan to implement gun control, teach evolution, and force everyone to have socialized health care.

V. I. Lenin said, “The West will sell us the rope we will use to hang
them”. And he may yet turn out to be correct.

I have one more thing to say before I drop this line of thought..

We live in a very strange time in American and the world. I think it is much stranger than we, who are immersed in it every day, realize. And I cite to you by example the fact that the last major Communist nation in the world should in fact both have a stock exchange and be suffering from the classic instability of an unregulated finance market. Say what you will, explain it however you care to, but I think it is fair to say that this is a very weird situation.